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The tins of smoked sprats, pickled herrings and mackerel in tomato sauce were a favourite staple of Soviet kitchens, as familiar as Heinz beans and Marmite in the West. But now the sprawling Brivais Vilnis cannery on the shores of the Gulf of Riga is facing hard times.

First the forklift truck drivers left for building sites in Ireland. Then the computer programmers headed to London, and the women who gut and thread the fish onto long needles for smoking departed for plants in Norway and Sweden.

While Britain weighs up leaving the EU because of a tide of migrant workers, for the little Baltic state of Latvia the long-sought dream of membership has come at a phenomenal price: the loss of many tens of thousands of its educated young.

Now a grand national effort, likened by diplomats to Israel’s immigration programme, has been launched to lure the diaspora home and avert a demographic catastrophe.

“Last November, we were seeking 20 workers, and it was almost impossible to find them,” complains Arnolds Babris, the chairman.

The town of Salacgriva has shrunk by a quarter to 7,959 people in 15 years.

“A good worker can earn €500 (£387) per month. If you have a house in the countryside, some pigs, vegetables in your garden, you can survive,” he says. “Compared to other European countries, it is very, very low. “

His rattling, decades-old production line cannot match the output of foreign competitors, he admits, but there are no plans to modernise.

“When investors come to Latvia, they are asking do you have the people? And we have to say, we don’t.”

THE STATISTICS are stark.

The Latvian population peaked at 2.6 million in 1990, the year of independence from punitive Soviet rule, which brought the first chance of travel overseas for most.

Immediate access to the Britain and Irish labour markets on joining the EU in 2004 was followed by a vast financial crisis that cut GDP by 18 per cent in 2009.

Emigration jumped to 40,000 people a year, many of them graduates saddled with vast mortgages that had been handed out like confetti by Scandinavian banks during the boom. Some 160,000 Latvians have registered to work in Britain since EU accession.

The return to growth has only slowed the flow, and the population is forecast to slide from 1.9 million today to 1.3 million by 2060. (Britain’s population, on the same Eurostat data, will grow by 15 million to 80 million).

The loss of the young has compounded a birth rate crisis. February was a typical month: 1,692 Latvians were born, while 2,463 passed away. Whole streets in central Riga stand abandoned.

“We are dying out,” says Prof Peteris Zvidrins, Latvia’s most eminent demographer, who warns that the pension system is at of risk of collapse.

The research centre he ran at the University of Latvia from the early 1980s closed in 2014 after a four-fold decrease in applications following EU accession.

“It’s impossible to prepare a small number of students, five or so,” he says. “There’s no doctorate programme in population studies. It was shut down. Those who had the possibility went abroad, to London, Oxford, Cambridge.”

Nils Usakovs, the Mayor of Riga, complains that his social workers are leaving in droves for Germany, which unlike Britain imposed migration controls on eastern European workers until 2011.

“The shortage of labour we face in many, many areas - primarily because of migration within the European Union. “It helped us through this crisis as people were able to find jobs. The price for this would be that many of them did not come back, and they are thinking of taking their families with them.”

The European Commission quietly acknowledges the economic cost, which must be weighed against the significant benefits of trade and foreign investment brought by joining the single market.

A recent report endorsed a British study, which found that just five years of emigration since 2004 had left a “permanent scar” on Latvian growth rates of at least three per cent, while the Bulgaria, Romania and Lithuania economies will have a permanent ten per cent cut.

Remittances only partially make up the shortfall, and tend to dry up the longer migrants are away from home, it noted.

Meanwhile, the European Commission’s call to offset the demographic crunch through refugees - backed by Mr Usakovs - is a hard sell in a country with little experience of non-white immigration. An EU quota of 776 Syrians and Iraqis sparked street protests in Riga.

Raivis Zeltits. The National Alliance party is strongly anti-immigration, and growing in popularity.Credit:
Julian Simmonds

“In the UK it started with a couple of hundred Jamaicans in the 1950s, and just look at it now,” says Raivis Zeltits, the secretary general of the National Alliance, which helped organise the demonstration.

The growing party of “ethno-nationalists” has three cabinet ministers in the coalition government, and is lobbying for more generous maternity allowances to boost the birth rate.

Ethnic Latvians have a “personal duty” to stop acting like “victims” and come home to build their country, Mr Zeltits adds.

For most Latvians, EU membership is non-negotiable. "It is better to be under pressure within the EU than to be without pressure outside," says Mr Usakovs. But the terms of free movement are beginning to be questioned.

Diplomats say the crisis helped David Cameron secure support for his welfare cuts; leaders in public had pledged to defend expats’ incomes, while in private pleading for help.

The government is considering tying student grants to a period of work in Latvia on graduation, as some private foundations already demand – a policy likely to fall foul of Brussels' strict rules on mobility.

Mr Babris approves: “In the Soviet Union, we had rules that after high school you had to work where you were sent."

Peteris Karlis Elferts, the Ambassador for the Diaspora, has taken inspiration from Israel in a campaign to encourage Latvians homeCredit:
Julian Simmonds

THE MAN leading the national effort to lure young Latvians home is Peteris Karlis Elferts, the Ambassador for the Diaspora. Having served in Ireland during the crisis, he admits few predicted that the wage difference would result in Latvians with Master’s degrees wanting to change sheets and serve beer in Dublin hotels.

Did the EU's leadership put enough thought into the consequences of enlargement?

“I don’t think so." He adds: “If you have highly educated workers leaving the economy and going into jobs lower than their education and qualifications, it hurts the EU economy.”

Britain has few grounds to complain about free movement, he suggests. “It’s proven outright it is more of a burden on us than it is to the host country.”

Latvia’s return migration campaign includes offering plum jobs in the civil service to those who graduate overseas, as well as organising summer camps, language schools, investment conferences and folk festivals around the world in order to keep Latvian culture alive. Dual citizenship among emigrés is now permitted.

To help Latvian families return home, he is lobbying the British government observe a largely-forgotten 1977 EU directive that obliges host states to teach migrant children in their mother tongue. The Foreign Ministry has offered to pay for Latvian teachers to attend state schools, following a successful pilot scheme in Ireland.

“Language learning, rather than integration and assimilation, maintains a principle of mobility,” he says.

But Mr Babris is pessimistic. “Many thought, I will go for a year or two and come back, but I know many who live in Great Britain and they say they don’t plan to. They have children and a mortgage. For us, it is not so good.”